Splits


By: Alex Katz

Splits by Alex Katz (b. Brooklyn, 1927) presents works painted in 2018 centring on portraits of women. In this series, the subjects are shown both singly and duplicated, in profile and full face, and the images are split by planes of colour and by the way that Katz frames the composition, his characteristic close-ups. The neutral backgrounds that silhouette the heads are always either blue or orange here, and the American painter plays with a reduced palette of flesh tones, reds, and browns of differing intensities that gives the series a unity within the diversity of feminine faces portrayed, some of which—Elizabeth, Ariel, and Vivien— are already familiar to those who know Katz’s work.